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ohthatpatrick
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Q3 - Horses, although descended from a forest-dwelling ances

by ohthatpatrick Thu Oct 24, 2019 9:11 pm

Question Type:
Explain/Resolve

Stimulus Breakdown:
Horses came from a forest-dwelling animal, but horses prefer grasslands.
Horses have gone through three cycles of population growth followed by rapid decline.
The last one peaked 25,000 years ago, during a cold period that came before a warm period.

Answer Anticipation:
This isn't quite the normal feel of Explain/Resolve questions, because we don't really have a countervailing background fact that provides tension. We're just trying to Explain why horses peaked 25k years ago and then rapidly declined. The ammunition they've given us would make you expect some sort of answer like "during the cold period leading up to 25k years ago, there were lots of grasslands to make the horses happy ... once it warmed, there weren't as many grasslands". But who knows?

Correct Answer:
D

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) We don't care about the ancestor, other than creating a contrast that horses prefer grasslands over forest.

(B) What a fun fact about one, single wild horse species existing today! It doesn't seem super useful to explain what happened to all horse species 25,000 years ago.

(C) Cool grassland fact, bro. This should also be a red flag to students because of the weak language of "some". Telling me which specific grasslands some horses live in today doesn't help me answer a question about all horse species 25,000 years ago.

(D) YES, this was actually there for the predicting. We knew two things: lots of horses during cold period / decline during warming period, and horses thrive in grasslands. This answer just connects those two.

(E) This basically makes us think that all three cycles of horse population increase/decrease may have coincided with these switches from cold to warm. But it still doesn't explain WHY horses are thriving during cold and declining during warm. This is more WHAT, without any WHY.

Takeaway/Pattern: Often, correct answers on Explain/Resolve involve surprising storylines, so I don't try too hard to anticipate answers. But in this case, since they had given us very little to go off of in terms of what would make horses surge or decline in population (grasslands), it was pretty straightforward to think we'd get an answer that connects this population cycle to grassland.

#officialexplanation